Chapter 24
Lucy wants to get out of the seminar room as soon as the class is finished.
No chance she’s hovering for the professor’s attention today.
She’s kept her face mask-still for the remainder of the session, but there’s a limit to how long she can keep it going.
She’s damned if she’s going to cry in front of him. Or anyone else, come to that.
As she gets to the door, Jessica catches hold of her arm. Lucy’s jaw clenches, the tightest of smiles. All the woman wants to do is rub her nose in it.
‘You coming to Formal Hall tonight?’ Jessica says. Alexandra is standing behind her, smiling.
Lucy tries not to look surprised. ‘No, I wasn’t planning to.’
‘You should – we’re all going.’ Jessica gestures round the room, taking in all the students. Some of them, Lucy would struggle to recognise outside class.
‘I might,’ she says. The professor is still looking at his phone as he sits at the end of the table. Time to pull herself together. ‘Fuck it, yes. It’s been ages since I had a proper night out. Count me in.’
Little black dress, black tights, black eyeliner.
She’s pulling out the stops, blending eyeshadow into the crease above her eyes and smoothing foundation and blusher over her skin.
She’s going to show them all what she’s got.
You think the professor’s going to turn up tonight and you want to scrub up for him, a little voice jeers inside her head, and she tells it to fuck off, adding a slick of lipstick and a spritz of perfume as she does.
When she gets down to the college bar to meet up with the others it becomes immediately clear that the group has evolved from mere seminar allies to close friends.
They’re doing shots of J?germeister to screeches of laughter, even the staidest of them.
Lucy blinks to see it, hesitates over the shot that she’s offered before tossing it down her neck so as not to be a spoilsport.
They cheer in encouragement as she does so, making room for her in their circle, though Lucy is sure she can feel a little hesitation from Ben and Alexandra, who are sitting a little too close together.
‘Not working tonight then?’ Alexandra says. She is smiling, but there’s no warmth there.
‘Night off,’ Lucy says. ‘Wouldn’t want to miss this.’
‘Of course not,’ Alexandra says. ‘Though I’m sure you have more important things to be doing. Say, for the professor?’ Her tone is nudging, something nasty at the core of it, though her smile continues to play on her lips.
A stone drops in Lucy’s stomach. She fights a snarl into a smile.
‘I can’t imagine finding anything more important than this.
So nice to get the chance to bond with everyone.
’ She gestures around her in an expansive way at the others sitting at the table, hoping she might flush out an ally. Ben actively looks away from her.
No one else catches her eye, or even smiles at her. She messed that right up. Hang on, that guy over there – he was smiling. Charles, Charlie, something like that? She arranges her features in what she hopes is a winning way and sets out to charm.
By the time the meal is over, she’s made some inroads. Charlie takes the seat next to her in the old dining hall.
‘Your presentation was excellent,’ he says.
‘Thanks. I feel very strongly about it.’
‘I can see that,’ he says. He pours red wine into her glass, filling it almost to the brim before doing the same to his, too. They toast each other, clinking the tumblers together carefully so as not to spill any of it.
Alexandra is sitting opposite Lucy. She’s banging on as usual about how much the portraits and wooden panels make her think of Hogwarts. ‘I’m in Ravenclaw, you know,’ she says.
Lucy catches Charlie’s eye and bites her lip. She mustn’t laugh.
When they leave the table, he walks by her side back to the bar.
She’s feeling a lot more relaxed. The shot helped, as did the copious amounts of red wine she had at dinner.
She takes a seat in one of the alcoves built deep into the wall of the beer cellar, and Charlie goes up to buy them drinks.
She eases off her shoes under the table.
The heels aren’t even that high, but she’s so unused to wearing them that they’re hurting her.
The relief is immediate, but lessened when Alexandra comes over and plumps herself down straight opposite Lucy. She’s accompanied by Soraya, another woman on the course with a very loud voice, who seems fractionally less of a bitch than Alexandra. At least, that’s what Lucy had thought.
Soraya leans forward on one elbow, an air of self-importance to her actions.
Lucy can feel her hackles rising, hairs standing up on the back of her neck.
Soraya opens her mouth to speak, and for a moment Lucy wants nothing more than to slam her hand into the woman’s face and stop her before she says something that Lucy can’t unhear.
‘Have you asked him about his wife?’ Soraya says.
‘I know she does some work with prison literacy,’ Lucy says, a sense of hauteur running through her. They can’t catch her out like that; of course she knows he’s married.
‘So you know I’m talking about the professor,’ Soraya says, smirking.
Lucy feels her cheeks flush red. ‘Who else would you be talking about?’ she says, trying to get the conversation back under her control.
‘He likes to keep his private life private, we all know that,’ Alexandra says, joining in. ‘But we all know about this wife.’
Lucy’s heart drops a beat.
‘But do you know about the other one? The wife before?’
Lucy looks at her, silent. She doesn’t know what to reply.
Alexandra licks her lips, the tip of her tongue darting from one side of her mouth to the other. She smiles again, showing her teeth.
‘The wife before?’ Lucy says eventually.
‘Yeah,’ Alexandra says. ‘The one who died.’